Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency

Sunshine Week may be just seven days in March, but fighting for government transparency is a year-round mission for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In fact, it's not unusual for litigation over public records to drag on for years upon years. To help make sense of it all, here's a handy infographic illustrating EFF's current Freedom of Information Act caseload.

Sunshine Week is often a time for transparency advocates to collectively lament about government secrecy and institutional resistance to accountability. But the week of advocacy is also an opportunity to highlight how, through patience and a lot of court motions, organizations such as EFF can pry important documents from agencies that would rather operate in the shadows.

EFF recently won favorable rulings in two hard-fought Freedom of Information Act cases involving reports of intelligence agency misconduct and agency attempts to mandate backdoors into our internet communications. In light of recent revelations about illegal NSA and FBI surveillance, the records produced in these cases could not be more timely.

If you're as much a transparency geek as we are, then you want the whole world to feel the radiation of Sunshine Week. To help blast out the message, EFF Senior Designer Hugh D'Andrade has created a series of banners and backgrounds to brighten up your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ profiles.

Monday marks the second day of “Sunshine Week”—a week to focus on the importance of open government and how to ensure accountability of our leaders at the federal, state, and local levels.

When US intelligence agencies were caught spying on Americans 40 years ago, Congress answered the public outcry by creating an investigative task force to bring these covert, and potentially illegal, practices into the light. The Church Committee, as it was commonly known because of its chairman, Sen. Frank Church, interviewed 800 people, held 271 hearings and published volumes upon volumes of reports—all of which paved the way for reform.